Congrats on your win in the weekly photo contest with this fantastic photo Quimico Esceptico :-)

Photographers notes:I like this image. Despite the fact that there are a lot of things going on around the main subject, e.g., the mail box in the foreground, the people in the background, I think they all add to the scene. Although moving in front of the puppet removed the clutter in the background, it also removed part of the hints that let you realize that this is an act that is taking place in the middle of the street to entertain turist.

Congrats on your win in the weekly photo contest with this stunning photo Tom :-)

Photographers notes:Here's the second of a few from yesterday's rather productive morning on the Northern Oregon Coast. I specifically chose Astoria as my destination for the morning after reading the forecast calling for overcast and patchy fog along the coast. After Aaron's workshop at the coast, it became apparent to me that these conditions are actually good days for photographing our coastal areas. The alternative destinaton for my morning would have been Mount Hood, but overcast and mountains don't work so well.

A 64x ND filter plus a polarizer were used to drive up the exposure time to >10 sec for the the misty look to the water amongst the pilings, complementing the fog in the distance. No editing was done to this other than resizing and adding the watermark. Below you will find a link to the black and white version of this same shot. I think it is a very strong shot for black & white and was tempted to post it as b&w instead. But I'll leave both here for you to look at. My intention for the morning was actually to shoot some black and white.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Congrats on being voted 1st place in the weekly photo contest Tannachy.

Photographers notes:So after 10 weeks in Asia and 4000 photos later, I have arrived home. Its taken me a whole day to sort through and organise everything before I can start processing and hopefully deleting them.

This shot is just the start of a potential torrent of photos from my travels in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar. I remember this scene very well as it was my last day in Sapa, which is in north west Vietnam. I had a bus to catch in about 2 hours and was wandering back to my hotel when by great luck I got to witness this wonderful light.

Congrats on tying for 2nd place in the weekly photo contest with this amazing capture fesign.

Photographers notes:The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.

Congrats on tying for 2nd place in the weekly photo contest with this fantastic catch Max!

Photographers notes:In the last couple weeks I had started reviewing my shots from 2010 for my annual "Best Of" collection. What I found was a year filled with a couple of obvious highlights and standout photos, but overall a bit of a subpar year photo-wise for me. I was actually having trouble finding 15 images to fill the gallery. So naturally I was hoping my final photo trip of the year might produce something memorable/spectacular.

The trip hasn't been great up to this point, and until today photo ops seemed few and far between. That all changed this afternoon.

A nice couple guided me to where the Lamar Valley's resident river otters had been hanging out the last few days (Yellowstone vets: not the Confluence). We arrived to find three of them slithering in and out of the mostly-frozen Lamar River. That's when two coyotes showed up.

I remembered a shot I had seen here on Flickr depicting some awesome otter/coyote interaction, taken by Ian Gethings during a winter Yellowstone visit a couple years ago. Naturally, I was hoping for something similar between the predatory coyotes and the underdog otters this time.

One coyote slowly circled the pool where the otter was hiding out, and I finally got both animals in the same frame when the otter peeked out. What happened next was completely unexpected.

The otter jumped out of the water, and instead of being pursued, it became the aggressor and went after the coyote. The poor confused song dog turned tail and ran. The otter kept moving like nothing had happened, dove back into the river and headed back to the den.